That's not really going to help the lack of accessible data and the lostech problem. And we are still a long way from any foreseeable AI system to first principles a nuclear weapon from basic physics. Now helping a team of actual physicists make one and offload some of the brute force computation.. - ThreadSky

reprapryn.bsky.social • 27 days ago

That's not really going to help the lack of accessible data and the lostech problem. And we are still a long way from any foreseeable AI system to first principles a nuclear weapon from basic physics.

Now helping a team of actual physicists make one and offload some of the brute force computation..

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jannehako.bsky.social•27 days ago

Well I’m not familiar with the subject of the lostech problem but to me it would sound preferable that the accessible data via a LLM would be regulated by some other actor than a nation state. Also, the model itself should not be rooted in a nation state. That just creates settings of dominance.

reprapryn.bsky.social•27 days ago

The Lostech in question It has to do with a material called Fogbank. The government lost the ability to understand what it was it was so classified. They had to reverse engineer it from the remaining few samples to make it again.

There's a lot of Lostech in the US government.

jannehako.bsky.social•27 days ago

Interesting.

poppyhaze.bsky.social•27 days ago

Fogbank was successfully re-engineered when someone had a brainwave we’re TOO good at chemistry now. In the 1970s, they weren’t using GCMS to quantify everything. Only pH, melting point, color checking. So they made it dirtier and got a comparable material.

reprapryn.bsky.social•27 days ago

I heard a joke that for all we know it was like some clay or mix sort of like what makes up baseball fields. One old guy's secret.

Old engineers were scrappy like that. Something that Ive noticed most American techs is incapable of fathoming. Everything has to be the best instead of good enough.

reprapryn.bsky.social•27 days ago

Even if it costs 10 times as much, needs unobtanium, and only gets a 1% improvement.

poppyhaze.bsky.social•26 days ago

I would recommend getting Max Gergel’s biography on hand, it’s a PDF circling around as its long out of print, but he was a Manhattan Project scientist and 1950s mad chemist and he has a great sense of humor talking about his life and changes in the industry

And he ordered a hit on a Nazi

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